


The Maiden and The Knight

by stonecoldsilly



Series: Sibing Rivalry [2]
Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Sad Ending, a short little sad bastard that haunted me so now it's your problem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:13:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25249714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stonecoldsilly/pseuds/stonecoldsilly
Summary: There is a song hunting Jaskier.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Series: Sibing Rivalry [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1848784
Comments: 24
Kudos: 110





	The Maiden and The Knight

Songs can change minds. This is something Jaskier is intimately familiar with. He has singlehandedly shifted the perception of witchers across the entire Continent. But he didn’t know he would be susceptible as well. A master bard, at the pinnacle of their craft, ought to be able to peel lyrics and rhyme and metre apart and peer at the cracked ounce of truth hidden from the uneducated. The delicate persuasion in the rhetoric of the entire oeuvre of his lifetime stands for itself. He can shift the tides of public opinion in a single ditty. But he creates songs. He does not feature in them. No one has ever sung or hummed or danced to a tale of Jaskier. Himself, the gleam behind the stage curtain, the whisper of glittering stones too shiny to be a real jewel. He is artifice, the hidden puppet master, shadowy heroes and monsters dancing to words he writes, he dreams, he sets dancing across the world. But now he is caught in a song.  


To the beginning.

After a less than auspicious meeting with Valdo Marx over the winter at Oxenfurt, where blood was nearly spilt and flagons of wine definitely were, the song begins to track him. He has reunited with Geralt, another spring dawning colder and brisker than he would like, but defined enough for their purposes. There are still remnants of snow in Oxenfurt when it begins to haunt him, lovingly dogging his steps. 

He doesn’t know this yet. He doesn’t know what Valdo has done. He does not know that after years of mutual enmity Valdo has seen enough of him to dig to the grubby root of his soul and bandy it about at every party and naming day and festival he is invited to. And there are many, for true enmity must be equal, and Valdo is Jaskier’s equal in education and talent, if not in heart and soul. 

Jaskier winds his way north, and the song follows, the song follows much more slowly, passing from lips to lips, only the heads of men to carry it, the fickle words slipping through some and pinned in others and only sung to hush babes. 

The song Valdo pens will shatter Jaskier completely, and tear the foundations of his world asunder. But it is only a song, and if Geralt had said nothing, as he usually did, as was his wont, then it would only have remained a dim fear, a fickle trickle of worry on sleepless nights, another strand of self-doubt, of which any poet worth his salt has hundreds, that he presses into paper and teases into metre. 

Any worthwhile poet must despise themselves a little, in order to dig out anything worthy and improve. And Jaskier is a very good poet. He is not vindictive, as Valdo is though, he has never seriously contemplated using his power over words and hearts and minds to destroy reputations and fan flames higher. He is, at heart, kind. And hopeful and in love and hopeless with it. 

Valdo is not. 

The song follows him. He doesn’t know it. 

Jaskier is sitting in a tavern with Geralt. His lute is upstairs for once, and they have fallen upon their dinner with hungry snapping mouths after a hard day’s travel. There is a minstrel there, fresh from the south, recently of Oxenfurt, or Cidaris, or Novigrad, of some bustling city where songs spread like wildfire through packed taverns of people starving for the latest entertainment. He knows not what he does. 

Jaskier idly contemplates greeting the man, a stranger, and enjoying a fraction of news from more metropolitan climes, and perhaps swapping tales of their trade, but the minstrel is in the middle of his set, and it would be poor form to interrupt the man’s work. He stays in his seat, enjoying the show with a keen professional eye, critiquing and noticing what no one else in a hundred miles of this battered tavern could. 

Jaskier should have interrupted him. 

The stranger finishes a bawdy tale of a barmaid, and then starts on a song Jaskier has not heard before. The air in the inn seems to hum with anticipation. He has always enjoyed hearing the latest compositions from Oxenfurt students or sharing fingering techniques with court performers. He sits up a bit in his chair, attention caught, and Geralt, next to him, always watchful of minor changes and shifts in human moods, pricks his own ears up as well. 

The song has found him. 

The minstrel sings well, a sweet beginning, of a maiden who fell in love with a knight. The knight travels across the kingdoms, as he is bid, fighting bandits and wicked men and defeating them with ease. 

This is not an outrageous departure for a song of knights and maidens, and Jaskier lets himself think it derivative. He has recognised the chord structure as Valdo’s by now, but it is about to catch him. 

The maiden in the song loves the knight, and he does not return her love. Again, not very imaginative. 

The maiden in the song leaves her warm home behind and follows the knight. She follows the knight on his travels and loves him. The maiden cleans his armour, and polishes his boots, and he treats her as a servant and a squire, with many harsh words. 

Jaskier is caught in the song. 

The maiden in the song follows the man she loves for years as he beds beautiful princesses and enchanting witches and never looks at her. The maiden in the song sings him to sleep and bathes his fevered brow and treats his injuries. 

Jaskier is caught in the song. 

The maiden dies, one cold morning, alone in the snow, too feeble from cold to go on where the knight leaves her behind, and he never thinks of her a moment more. 

Jaskier is caught in the song. 

Valdo has opened the way, but Geralt does the deed himself. The knight does the deed himself. 

If Geralt had said nothing, had not let music that was not Jaskier’s ensnare him, then Jaskier would have remained at his side still. Perhaps more fragile than before, a fraction more timid, some part of him rebelling against being a cautionary tale. 

But Geralt does not keep to his usual hard-won words, that Jaskier has always treated like a gift. Perhaps he means to discuss the bard’s interests with him, to show him some care after having a patient ear for tales of monsters. Perhaps he just feels like idle conversation with a friend. Perhaps he just feels like talking, for once. 

Jaskier is reeling from the song, still. He is re-examining his past, present and future. Valdo Marx has delivered a mighty blow and is not here to witness its landing. This can be concealed until he has the time to tease the song apart and examine every line and assonance for its bitterest meanings. He remembers every line. Jaskier is a consummate performer, and this song has cut him to the very heart. He will hear its echoes for the rest of his life. 

Geralt knows none of this. He has had no education in metaphor, or allegory. He has heard a song about a girl and a boy, and wasted love. The fancies of humans, he thinks. 

He says to Jaskier, who is sitting still beside him, in that same idle way as someone remarking on the weather (if ever Geralt was the sort of person to remark on that sort of thing), he says to his friend Jaskier- the maiden Jaskier- the knight says- the Witcher says- Geralt says-

‘She was a bit pathetic, wasn’t she?’ 

The knight-witcher does not look at the maiden-bard, as he says this. He is half awaiting some dramatic and witty reply from his friend, half contemplating pushing through the crowd to fetch another ale. He is watching the crowd, the minstrel, the humans around them, alert to outside threats. He does not watch jaskier-bard-maiden as this is said. There is nothing to watch. Jaskier does not permit his face to move. The fingers on his left hand flex slightly tighter on his tankard. 

He does not respond. Geralt goes to fetch another ale. 

By the time he returns, the showman, the performer, the person inside Jaskier’s head peering out through his eyes and watching himself always, always, has taken over. Jaskier is inside his own head, as his body chatters and laughs and jokes exactly as normal, not a muscle in his performance out of place. The performance must be perfect, and so it is. No Witcher nose can scent a thing past the happiness Jaskier exudes, not a tinge of sweat or salt or other malodorous scent pierces the veil of his showmanship. Years and years of little white lies about lovers or stolen pies or lost saddlebags in Geralt’s presence have stood well as a test. He is practiced enough to fool a Witcher. He could lie to the gods themselves. 

The performance must succeed, and it does, and Geralt is none the wiser, already planning the next weeks journey as he lets the false Jaskier chatter as the Jaskier inside his own head waits, and waits. He has only one tell, and his fingers echo the notes of the song in the air, but Geralt does not know to recognise the song by patterns of air and ghostly fingering, and this is what Jaskier in his cups looks like anyway, music humming through his being. Usually it is his own song, not one of him. 

No one will know Jaskier is caught in the song. Geralt has not the years of education in these specifics to work it out, he cannot read through the false Jaskier, in the heat and swelter of a crowded tavern. No one else will ever work it out. 

Jaskier knows though, and Valdo does. 

Valdo will know, and Jaskier will know, the two of them alone on the continent, spreading songs to bait the other across the world, kingdoms and miles and days away.

Valdo knows and Jaskier knows, using the minds of men and the tongues of women as mouthpieces, demented love letters across a whole vast world. 

Jaskier knows now. He cannot remain the maiden and live. Not without always performing, always second guessing, he knows that Geralt thinks the woman in the song pathetic. He knows Geralt does not know what the song has done. To them, to him. 

Jaskier travels with Geralt for another week, singing, making merry, distancing the night in the tavern from Geralt’s mind. What happened there? Nothing special. Another night in another tavern in a Witcher’s long long life. 

He leaves at a crossroads on a sunny spring day, waving farewell to the Witcher as cheerily as always, a fond smile for his friend, off to seek fame in Vizima, or a woman in Redania, or the spring festivals in Toussaint, which was it?

Geralt will expect to see him come around the next corner for the rest of his life. 

Jaskier leaves, and never seeks out the Witcher again. 

The song has caught him.


End file.
